By Percy L. Parker.
SHOWING HOW THE FORTRESS IS ASCENDED AND THE GROOVES WHERE THE GALLERY RAN.
Perhaps the most remarkable rock in the world is to be found in the centre of the Island of Ceylon, and its story is full of romance It was fortified 1,400 years ago to shelter a cowardly parricide, and when he died it became a Buddhist monastery. But for centuries no human foot rested on its summit; it was the abode of silence; its walls were buried beneath the dust of ages, birds built their nests on it and the beasts of the field haunted the jungle which grew about its base.
Now British officials have scaled its walls, excavated its ruins, and revealed the ancient splendour of the place, and so doing have discovered that this rock fortress is one of the most wonderful pieces of engineering of ancient times.
It is called the Sigiri or Lion Rock, and lies fourteen miles north-east of Dambutta. It is cylindrical in shape, and rises up nearly 600 feet sheer from the ground, while the area of the summit is little over an acre. Its scarped walls are nearly perpendicular, and in some places they overhang their base.
Recent excavation shows that all round the foot of the rock there was a fortified city, surrounded by a moat. But the most wonderful feature of this fortress was the terrace, ornamented with lions, which ran round the north face of the rock at its smallest diameter. At one part it stood upon the rock which projected below, and at the same time was protected by that part which overhung it. The terrace then zig-zagged up the rock at an easy gradient, and so gave access to its otherwise inaccessible summit, to which, in the last resort, the fugitive intended to flee.
One hundred yards of this terrace still remains, and its structure of several courses of brick can clearly be seen in one of the photographs, while the grooves in the rock show where the rest of it ran. Professor Davids says that the path was on the top of a solid brick wall, four or five feet broad, which was carried along the face of the cliff. "The cliff being perpendicular, this wall had to descend far below the path before it found a resting-place on the edge of the rock. As the path was gradually carried forward and upward, a line was dropped from it to the rock beneath, and where the line first touched the cliff—however far below—a flat place was scooped out, large enough to support a single brick. This was done along the whole breadth of the path, and then the solid wall was built up to the requisite height, while some of the outer rows of bricks were carried high enough to form a wall breast high on the outer side."
